Don’t schedule a &$&% meeting during lunchtime without serving up lunch to us!
I hear you, but given that my “lunchtime” could be anywhere between 11:00 and 15:00 (and that’s not even allowing for timezones), that’s pretty impractical.
In my last two jobs in two different countries the unwritten rule is to not schedule a meeting between 12-13. Not everyone has lunch at the same time, and everyone is free to have lunch whenever they want, but this guarantees that you will have some time to have lunch even if you are booked by meetings around noon. But it doesn’t really solve the timezone issue.
“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
My place of business has this dysfunction with meetings—Zoom being the biggest offender—where people just keep talking through the end of a meeting. 30-minute meetings become 35-40. 60-minute meetings becomes 65-70. And, with meetings frequently being back-to-back-to-back, invariably one or another person is late to the next one.
I think it’s because scheduling a meeting with all necessary parties is so difficult that if you don’t finish the thought, the next chance is at least a week away.
To top it off, we had a company-wide survey that spawned a working group to tackle the problem of meetings, whose suggestion was to update Outlook settings to automatically shorten meetings by X minutes—to allow people transit time, bathroom breaks, etc. Almost no one set that setting.
Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
People having video calls at their desks. We have soundproof booths and conference rooms but no, people will just talk loudly in the open space area. It’s like people talking on the phone on a bus. Hearing only one side of the conversation is super distracting. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other will be on the same video call. I guess more people are bothered but not enough to do something about it.
Open offices are a mistake.
Having to reserve conference rooms to have a semblance of quietude is a terrible system. I don’t miss that shit.
We had a loud talkative guy at my place. Fucking deep voice that he was projecting like he was on a stage or something. It was not possible to have a conversation near him when he was on Zoom. We barely spoke in the open area anyway, but some people just wouldn’t shup up. I can still hear their stupid voice when I think about it.
Like the other person said edge is the only approved browser and they don’t like Firefox.
We are software developers and they don’t like Firefox.
Also, they don’t allow wearing headphones and it’s awfully quite sometimes and I have ADHD and have to fill that noise by talking.
Mandatory webcam on calls/meetings. I get that it works for team building when half the developers are at home at any given time, but it exhausts me in meetings.
You sit there with nothing to say/do while you listen, constantly having to look forward and pay attention. Then your jaw starts to feel tense, but you can’t just open your mouth or move around too much.
Total torture for 60+ minute meetings. In my previous company we had the webcams always off, so I could relax or if it was only talking with no presentation even sit on my couch away from the PC.
I’m not sure how much of this pressure is from your company or self-driven, but I always keep my webcam on and I don’t give a shit about sitting straight or looking attentive or whatever. Half the time I’m fucking around with stuff in the background. Nobody has ever said anything about it.
